The Story of Human Language: The Great Courses (Literature & English Language; 3 Volumes)

Professor McWhorter covers a wealth of material, enlivened with wit and personal observations: How did different languages come to be?, Why isn't there just a single language? How does a language change, and when it does, is that change indicative of decay or growth?, How does a language become extinct? Professor McWhorter addresses these and other questions as he takes you on an in-depth, 36-lecture tour of the development of human language, showing how a single tongue spoken 150,000 years ago has evolved into the estimated 6,000 languages used around the world today.